


Blood Does Not Water the Found Family Tree

by XaviaAndromedovna



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blurry Woman (Supernatural: Carry On) is Eileen Leahy, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Castiel and Dean Winchester and Sam Winchester are Jack Kline's Parents, Crack Treated Seriously, Dean Winchester Has Internalized Homophobia, Episode: s15e18 Despair - Castiel's Confession Scene, F/M, Found Family, Future Fic, Gen, Genealogy, Internalized Biphobia, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Queer Families, Quote: Family Don't End With Blood (Supernatural), Self-Harming Dean Winchester, Storytelling, and they were ROOMMATES, bury your gays, mostly angst with some fluff, no beta we die like new Dean's gay uncles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28492224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XaviaAndromedovna/pseuds/XaviaAndromedovna
Summary: Dean II has to do a family tree assignment and Sam has to gently explain why listing Uncle Dean and Uncle Cas as married is... controversial.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester Jr. (Supernatural: Carry On) & Sam Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, background Kaia Nieves/Claire Novak - Relationship
Comments: 35
Kudos: 242





	Blood Does Not Water the Found Family Tree

**Author's Note:**

> It's time to play Who's More In Denial: Dean about his sexuality or me about being back in this godsforsaken fandom? I continue to have Several Feelings about Dean Winchester's in-universe queer legacy and how impossible it is for Sam to tell Dean II anything about Dean and Cas without mentioning how obnoxiously in-love they were, so here have some found family apologia and also the lowkey hilarity of trying to map the Winchesters onto a family tree-- with birth and death dates no less! If you need me I'll be in the other room yelling at clouds about straight people.

It’s a testament to how far he’s come since his world came crashing down with the defeat of Chuck that he can laugh about this. His dad used to bury any mention of mom except in reference to his all-consuming vendetta. Sometimes Dean could talk about the dearly departed with ease but as with many things involving Dean’s emotions it was more often like pulling teeth. At first, Sam couldn’t bear to mention all he’d lost in such a short timeframe. It was all he could do most days to get out of bed. But eventually, it occurred to him that if he refused to talk about his dead loved ones, he’d have no one left to discuss.

Sam walks in to find Dean the Second at the kitchen table, working on the family tree project his fifth grade teacher assigned them yesterday. “Dean-Bean!” His son jumps excitedly out of his chair and hugs him. Over his shoulder he can see haphazardly placed blocks on one side and neatly arranged blocks on the other.

“Hey dad! Can you help me with this? I’m having a hard time connecting everyone in. Also do you know when Uncle Cas was born? Or what year he and Uncle Dean got married? I asked mom but she said to ask you.”

He freezes in shock, staring down at the project. Eileen’s side is fairly straightforward, but next to Dean II’s name is Jack’s, as his brother. Bobby and Mary are listed as Sam and Dean’s parents. The same type of line connecting Sam’s name with Eileen’s connects Cas and Dean’s names. Several free-floating boxes are set off to the side. And when he registers the question, it forces a guffaw out of him, then a full-on laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Dean asks with a frown.

“Nothing, sorry…” He wills himself to calm down. “Nothing, it’s just that if your Uncle Dean had heard you ask that he’d be seething quietly in the corner.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story.” _‘Shouldn’t it be Deastiel?’_ “To answer your question, Dean and Cas never married.”

“Why not? Because it wasn’t legal yet?”

“Oh, well, actually it was, towards the end there, but it wouldn’t’ve mattered because neither of them legally existed.”

“So then why didn’t they just have a hunter’s wedding?”

Sam guides Dean back to his chair and takes the one next to him. “Lots of reasons. Cas was an angel, Dean didn’t really believe in marriage, there was never enough time to even admit they liked each other let alone do anything about it…” The familiar bitterness about the way things went down returns, the life Dean and Cas never got to have, but he pushes it aside. “It just wasn’t in the cards for them.” He looks down at the tree and laughs again, perfectly envisioning the glare Dean would’ve given the offending paper. “You can leave it like that if you want, but it’ll probably be easier just to leave Castiel off of it entirely for a project like this. She’s really asking about biological family.”

Dean looks at him with confusion and just a tinge of hurt. “But I thought family didn’t end in blood.”

Sam can still hear the way Bobby’s voice choked slightly the first time he’d said that, their surrogate father desperately trying to be there for the boys he had such a strong hand in raising. No family tree would ever be able to capture the twin looks of pride and exasperation Bobby always wore when he looked at them, the mischief of Charlie’s smile, the grit of Cas’s voice. How would you explain Jack’s three dads—or Jack himself for that matter—and how could you _not_ explain it and still dare to call it a Winchester family tree?

“You’re absolutely right,” Sam concedes softly. “Unfortunately, that means your tree would require a lot more work than your classmates’, so either we have to think really hard about how to draw this to fit everyone in, or we simplify it. If we simplify it, we can knock this out right now and your teacher will be more likely to accept it, but then we’d leave some really important people off and we’d have to stretch the truth on how everyone’s related. If we do the whole thing, then we have to take our time with it and the teacher still might not accept it, but sometimes the truth is complicated and hard to accept, and maybe our tree should reflect that.” Dean frowns down at his project in thought. “I’ll respect your decision either way on this, but you have to pick one now so we can get this done.”

Honestly, Sam’s not sure which one he’s hoping the boy picks. This project could easily get out of hand in terms of work, and debating who is and isn’t “family enough” to include sounds exhausting. However, the lesson he wants Dean to take from this project is exactly the one his son’s already pointed out, and part of him hopes he’ll stick to his guns and make the teacher think about the fact that not everyone comes from a cookie-cutter nuclear family. Dean’s voice is quiet but resolute. “Ohana means family.” His favorite Disney movie, _Lilo and Stitch_ , of course that’s what he’d say. “Family means—”

“Nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten,” Sam finishes with a proud smile. Attaboy. “In that case we’re gonna need a lot more colored pencils.”

~~~

Dean adds Cas’s name right next to Uncle Dean’s again and grabs the pencil they’ve denoted as “marriages and unions”. He hesitates when Sam looks at him with a raised eyebrow. “Should I not connect them?”

Now that’s a loaded question if Sam ever heard one. Dean would probably hate that this is his legacy: _that_ uncle with the queer ‘roommate’ no one in the family knows how to bring up. He would probably see that purple line as an accusation or a joke at his expense. But then again, those three weeks after Cas died, he became a lot less defensive about their relationship, and one drunken night he told Sam the full story of how it all went down.

“I’m not sure, kiddo. Did I ever tell you about what happened to them?”

Dean gets uncomfortable in the way kids do when having serious conversations. “A little. Uncle Cas died to save Uncle Dean so he could defeat Chuck.”

“Yeah, well the way it happened is kind of important.” Sam hopes Dean will forgive him for sharing this story, but there’s no one else left to tell it and it deserves better than to die with him. “So Cas died for like the fourth or fifth time around when Jack was born, and when Jack got older he heard Dean mourning him and woke Cas from the Empty. When he woke up, Cas basically annoyed the Cosmic Entity running the Empty so much that it spit him back to Earth. That would have been the end of it, except like a year or two later Jack also died for a bit and because he was a Nephilim at the time both Heaven and the Empty had a claim on him.”

“Why?”

“Well his soul was human so it went to Heaven, but the Cosmic Entity argued that as an angel he should be sent to the Empty. The Entity came to Heaven to claim him, but Cas made a bargain with it, knowing that it’d be happy to have a shot at punishing him. The Entity agreed to let Jack live, but it also let Cas go back to Earth with a curse: the instant Cas experienced a moment of true happiness, the Entity would be summoned and drag him to the Empty for eternity.”

Dean has crawled into his lap by this point and is listening to him as intently as he does whenever he’s telling a bedtime story, which in some macabre way this is. All the best fairytales started as fucked-up cautionary fables, after all.

“Now Cas thought this was a win-win, since he honestly believed it was impossible for him to experience that moment of true happiness, because—” Sam did his best Cas impression like he often did when telling stories about the angel, trying to remember the exact words Dean used. “‘The one thing I want, is something I know I can’t have.’”

Dean giggles at the voice but he’s still engrossed in the story. “What did he want?”

“Uncle Dean,” Sam replies softly. “He more or less forgot about the deal until Billie, who was Death at the time, tried to reap them. He and Dean hid in the dungeon, and then he realized that while he was definitely going to die either way, he could still save Dean. So he summoned the Cosmic Entity by letting himself be happy. Now Cas didn’t know if Dean felt the same way, but he realized that simply telling him how much he loved him would be enough, so he confessed his love for Dean, and the Entity took him and Billie. Dean of course went on to defeat Chuck… and then died less than a month later. Mostly from a piece of rebar on a hunt gone wrong, but I also suspect a broken heart.”

These memories hurt to revisit, but it’s more the dull ache of unused muscles asserting their displeasure than the acute sting they held when they were fresh. It’s easier with the distance of time and the comfortable weight of his son in his lap. Still, the memory of Dean’s final death, that pitiful “ _stay with me_ ,” continues to haunt him.

“Did Uncle Dean love him too?”

He can still hear his brother’s whiskey-fueled sobs. “ _I didn’t say it back, Sammy. I didn’t get to say it back_.” “Yeah, he did. But he never got around to telling Cas, and by the time he drummed up the courage it was too late.”

“I don’t get it, why didn’t he just say it back?”

“Hmm…” How to explain internalized biphobia to a 10-year-old. “Do you remember when we had that talk about Aunt Claire and Aunt Kaia and how sometimes people treat them badly because they’re both girls?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Dean never really talked to me about it in detail so I’m guessing here, but I think he was afraid of what would happen if people knew he liked both boys and girls—and angels, angels don’t really have gender in the same way as humans, but that’s another conversation. Point is, Dean was attracted to all kinds of people, but the way he and I grew up, he only really let himself express his feelings for girls. You have to understand, we grew up in the 80s and 90s, in rural America, plus we were hunters and well…” He remembers some of John’s choice rants over the years. “Let’s just say your grandfather was a piece of work sometimes and was probably 75% of the reason Dean had so many hang-ups about it.

“People used to make fun of him and Cas all the time for being in love with each other, years before they ever acknowledged their feelings. Myself included,” he admits. Dean looks at him wide-eyed. “I stopped once it became clear it wasn’t a joke and they actually were into each other.” Mostly. “Still, even when it became safer for him to come out, even when we’d met other queer hunters, even when his love for Cas was plain as day and practically unignorable, he refused to talk about it.”

“Why?”

“When you grow up being told who you are as a person is inherently bad, that you deserve pain and hate and ridicule because of something about you you can’t control… eventually you start to believe it’s true. Sometimes before you even know that’s a part of you in the first place. And even when no one tells you that anymore, or even if they directly say it’s okay, it’s too late because the damage is already done. Dean learned very early on that if he wanted to survive, he had to be a specific kind of person, and I truly believe that ultimately that’s what got him in the end, that suicidal drive to kill or be killed. The meanest bully Dean ever had was always himself. He hated himself for many, many things, and his feelings for Cas was one of them. I think he eventually started to unlearn that and accept that maybe he didn’t have to be straight and maybe he did deserve to be loved but… well… he didn’t really get a chance to find out.”

Dean has been sniffling throughout most of the story but dutifully trying to hold it back so Sam would continue telling it. Finished, he pulls the boy close to him as his own tears fall for the plight of his brother. Eventually, his eyes fall once again on the project. Were they or weren’t they? He suddenly remembers the day he found Cas and Jack’s names etched into the table under their initials. Despite Dean’s own fears, he would never want Cas’s sacrifice to be forgotten. Their love saved the whole damn universe; it deserves to be remembered.

When his son turns around in his lap to face the table, Sam gently picks up the colored pencil. Wiping the remaining tears from his eyes, he draws a decisive, purple line between Dean Winchester the First and Castiel.


End file.
